You’re in the middle of negotiating an important contract with your top client when the phone cuts out. Your firm is deep into filing clients’ taxes when the internet goes offline. Your customers are trying to reach out to you with important questions, and they can’t get through, and if they can’t get through to you, they might call someone else. Bottom line: downtime is expensive. Each minute that passes and your business is operating without a functioning phone and internet connection, your business is losing ROI because you’re unable to be profitable without the system working properly. According to the Ponemon Institute, unplanned outages have increased 38 percent since 2010 (see graph below). And the worst part is that all of this is out of your hands as a business owner; you have no idea how long your service provider will take to fix the issues. Twinstate Technologies® has redundancy and resiliency solutions that can circumvent and prevent downtime for your organization and provide the disaster recovery you need in the event your business is affected.
When considering what goes into your phone and internet networks, understanding what redundancies and resiliencies your system has is essential to how your business functions and ultimately connects with the outside world. Recently there have been cases in the region where internet and phone providers who are not equipped with contingency plans have had temporary system failures that affect thousands of businesses. When their internet goes out due to a system failure, upgrade error, human error or the like, businesses depending on them for internet will not only lose the internet connection but their phone as well. This happens simply because they are run on the same fiber without a backup to connect to. In a world where most everything we do is dependent on internet connectivity, this is a major issue.
Understanding what redundancies and resiliencies your system has is essential to how your business functions.
Redundancy and resiliency refer to the failsafe plan that professionals like Twinstate can assist you with. We can design and implement solutions for your business to avoid loss of productivity, customers, and therefore, revenue. Our services have several layers of failovers and resiliency to ensure glitches in providers, systems or peoples’ actions do not cause irreparable harm. These very failsafes assure our customers are always operating smoothly even in the event of a network failure. For instance, in the case of your phone and internet connections going down, your services could be rerouted using a backup service that allows you to operate as if nothing ever happened. Primarily, these failovers act as a “Plan B” and allow for your business to continue running without any downtime.
As a Managed Service and Security Provider (MSSP), Twinstate has designed for several alternative failovers in the event there is internet or dial tone loss. And, your company does have options on what outages will impact you.
Preplanning and developing a Business Continuity Plan or Continuity of Operations Plan is a significant step forward. Leaning on professionals like Twinstate who can guide you with simple steps to take is key. An “all at once” approach may seem overwhelming to achieve by a small business whose days are busy taking care of immediate business and customer needs. But, it is do-able with the help of a qualified third party like Twinstate.
For customers who experience downtime, the ultimate worry is how quickly they can get their business operational again. Those companies who partner with Twinstate experience this worry far less than other service providers’ customers simply due to how intricate our failover systems are. At Twinstate, we provide several backup sources for phone and internet rather than just one. If there is a failure, there are backups even for our backups. For example, it isn’t just the mode of connection we account for. Twinstate also has several data centers hosted offsite to serve as an extra layer of backup, whether it be for your service or for any data you may have lost due to an outage.
At Twinstate, we provide several backup sources for phone and internet rather than just one.
Now that you understand the basics of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Telecommunications (Telco) services, it’s time to ensure that downtime is addressed properly going forward. Making the small investment with an MSSP professional who has taken their business continuity with redundancy and resiliency services to the next level will help ensure that your business stays operational in the event of an unexpected outage.